Audiobook · read by volunteers
Dracula
Bram Stoker (1847–1912)
Read by Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Fox in the Stars, Gord Mackenzie, Michael Crowl, R. Francis Smith, Susan Hooks, Marlo Dianne, Hugh McGuire, Anita Roy Dobbs, David Barnes · 27 chapters · 16 h 31
About the book
A young solicitor travels to a remote castle in the Carpathians to help a nobleman buy a house in England. What he finds there will haunt him for the rest of his life. Bram Stoker’s Dracula unfolds through letters, journals and newspaper clippings, drawing together a small circle of friends, among them Mina Harker, Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing, who slowly realise that an ancient evil has crossed the sea to feed on the living. Between the first shiver and the last pursuit lie sleepwalking, ruined ships, a hospital for the mad and a fierce determination to stop the Count. Atmospheric, suspenseful and still frightening, this classic has shaped our image of the vampire for over a century. Ten voices share the reading of more than sixteen hours of dark delight.
Introduction
The classic vampire story by Bram Stoker, who lived from 1847 to 1912, revolves around a struggle between good and evil, tradition and modernity, and lust versus chastity. Stoker did not invent vampires, but his novel, published in 1897, has so captured the public’s imagination that he is rightly considered their popularizer. Listen and you will meet not only the Count himself, but heroes such as Jonathan Harker and Abraham Van Helsing.
The book is told through a patchwork of diary entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper cuttings and recorded notes. This structure gives the story a realistic feeling, as though the reader were being shown a file of evidence, and it allows the narrative to move quickly between different places and different witnesses. The opening journey to Transylvania and the later scenes in England are among the best-known sequences in horror fiction.
Stoker wrote in the late Victorian period, when anxieties about science, foreign influences and changing roles for women ran high, and his novel reflects them all. Readers continue to find new meanings in it, which partly explains its long life on stage and screen.
The recording is divided into 27 chapters and lasts about sixteen and a half hours. It is read by ten LibriVox volunteers, whose different voices suit the multiple narrators of the book particularly well. It is a long listen, but the short chapters make it easy to enjoy in instalments. If you know the character only from films, the original may surprise you with its slow-building dread. It remains a gripping choice for dark evenings, long drives and anyone who likes their suspense with a Gothic atmosphere.
Public domain
Bram Stoker died in 1912: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text